Abstract
AbstractWhat do Christians do when they read? How can Christian reading be understood anthropologically? Anthropologists of Christianity have offered many ethnographic descriptions of the interplay among people, words, and material objects across Christian groups, but descriptions of Christian reading have often posited an androgynous reader. In response to this we begin from the observation that while reading cannot be done without words, it also cannot be done without a body. We propose that an analytic approach of placing language and materiality (including bodies) together will help clarify that reading texts is an embodied practice, while not undermining the importance of working with words. We draw inspiration from the recent interest in bringing linguistic anthropology and materiality studies together into the same analytic frame of “language materiality.” We explore a language-materiality approach to reading by comparing how the biblical story of Mary and Martha was read by Protestant women in two historical situations: 1920s Norway and the 1950s United States. We argue that in these cases the readers’ gendered, raced, and classed bodies were central to the activity of reading texts, including their bodies’ material engagements with the world, such as carrying out women's work. We suggest that paying attention to embodied reading—that is, readers’ social entanglements with both language and materiality—yields a fuller analysis of what reading is in particular historical situations, and ultimately questions the notion of a singular Protestant semiotic ideology that works consistently toward purification.
Highlights
In the last four decades, ethnographic studies of reading have challenged the idea that reading is a straightforward activity of taking knowledge from texts
We present the two cases of women reading the biblical text of Mary and Martha, and, in working through our discussion of these readings, we argue that reading practices are constituted by language and materiality
Reading in Christian communities fundamentally involves materiality, of the text as a material object and through the bodily act of reading and its entanglement with myriad cultural hierarchies and political-economic processes. Though they have yet to be united under a common theoretical framework, we suggest it is productive to link the embodiment of reading with the rich literature on material religion
Summary
In the last four decades, ethnographic studies of reading have challenged the idea that reading is a straightforward activity of taking knowledge from texts. The intertextual practices of these Lutheran women had material effects by raising funds for mission stations in, for example, South Africa and Madagascar, which was in turn made possible by the political-economic projects of British and French colonization, emerging social democracy in Norway, and postwar adjustment in the United States This landscape of women’s groups stood in various relationships with formal, male-led Protestant organizations and church bodies. When we say that Henny Dons and her contemporaries were “reading” the story of Mary and Martha, we are referring to a web of new and interlinked language practices—speaking, listening, reading, and writing—that some Lutheran women in Norway began engaging in around the turn of the twentieth century These were negotiated within a larger context of institutional, religious, and societal shifts regarding what Christian women could do with their embodied identities. It made the material environment of the home, as much as the foreign fields of the missionaries about whom WMF members were reading, into a space in which one could engage in religious work and re-envisioned household activities, whether a cooked meal or tidy kitchen, as potential manifestations of personal piety
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